Abstract We explore configurations of sufficient and necessary conditions for the evolution and resilience of borrower trust in their lenders. Because trust is a dynamic phenomenon that needs to be understood in terms of change over time, we rely on longitudinal data collected from managers of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SME) who are clients of cooperative banks operating in Austria and Finland, and perform fuzzy set qualitative analysis. Our findings show support for a positive feedback loop of interpersonal trust and positive bank lending decisions. In case of mixed or negative bank lending decisions, breeding and sustaining interpersonal trust appears to be more complex as it requires a rooting in actors’ general propensity to trust and/or trust in the institutional environment. We discuss the implications for the theory and practice of trust‐based exchange relations.
Moro et al. (Thu,) studied this question.